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What then is the explanation? It may be this, that the court, and
the officials as a whole, felt that the Emperor was an unsafe
person to resume the throne, and that it were better that one man
should perish than that the whole regime should be upset. They
even refused to allow a foreign physician to go in to see him,
saying that of his own free will he had turned again to the
Chinese, all of which indicates that it was not the plot of any
one man.
Why then should Yuan Shih-kai have been made the scapegoat of the
court and the officials, and branded as a murderer in the face of
the whole world? That may be another plot. The radical reformers,
followers of Kang Yu-wei, have been making such a hubbub about
the matter ever since the death of the Emperor and the Empress
Dowager that somebody had to be punished. They said that Yuan had
been a traitor to the cause of reform, that he had not only
betrayed his sovereign in 1898, but that now he had encompassed
his death.
Now to satisfy these enemies, the Prince Regent may have decided
that the best thing to do was to dismiss Yuan for a time. I think
that the trivial excuse he gives for doing so favours my
theory--with "rheumatism of the leg," to which is added, "Thus
our clemency is manifest"--a sentence which may be severe or may
mean nothing, and when the storm has blown over and the sky is
clear again, Yuan may be once more brought to the front as Li
Hung-chang and others have been in the past
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